11 Hidden Hooks of Anxiety

Do you feel that despite your best efforts at overcoming your anxiety you are making two steps forward and three steps back? You’re not alone.

After working with many people with anxiety, I’ve uncovered some “hidden” beliefs or reasons why one may stay hooked to worry, fear and anxiety, despite hating these feelings. The following hidden beliefs are extremely common. Don’t feel bad if they are tripping you up too.

Worry Myths

We’ll start with the Top 5 Worry Myths. Many people are surprised to learn they’re hooked by one or more of the following beliefs:

1. Worrying will stop something bad from happening in the future.

2. Worrying about a negative outcome will prepare me for it.

3. Worrying helps me come up with all my options for a particular situation.

4. Worrying helps me feel as if I’m doing something about the problem.

5. Worrying sometimes helps me avoid thinking about something else.

Patterns That May Contribute To Your Anxiety

Here are a few others that may resonate with you and keep you holding on to your old patterns:

• Your success at work demands that you’re constantly thinking ahead, juggling, planning, problem solving. You don’t want to risk messing up, and you feel your worry and anxiety make sure you don’t.
• You are the hub that holds your busy family together. Getting everyone to where they need to go, when they need to be there, with what they need to have, and completing what they need to have completed. You need to be thinking all the time, or things will start to fall apart. Worry and anxiety just come with the territory of being a good parent.
• Worrying shows that you care and are keeping problems, yours and others’, front and center in your mind. If you stop worrying, it’ll be like you stop caring.

Or how about these:

• You’ve always been really sensitive and intuitive. Although it has its downsides, you’ve always considered it something that made you special. When you feel anxious or worrisome thoughts, it may be a premonition, and you don’t want to risk not listening to it.
• Your mom or dad seemed to worry a lot or have anxiety. In a way that is hard for you to explain, you feel more connected to them when you worry or have anxiety too. Especially if they are no longer with you and you miss them.
• You grew up vowing not to be __________ (i.e., poor, alcoholic, overweight, sick, unhappy, etc.) like your family. If you aren’t constantly worried and thinking of these things, you’re afraid you may follow in their footsteps.

We humans are complex creatures. At the most core level we operate around two principles: avoid pain and seek pleasure. What we view as pain and pleasure aren’t always obvious. Subconsciously we may “hide” important pieces of information from ourselves, or start reinforcing behaviors based on erroneous beliefs.

And then we’re blindsided when we experience bumps in the road. Do any of these hidden hooks resonate with you?

7 Skills to Get Your Small Talk On

Social Skills Tricks of the Trade

A few skills up your sleeve will not only help you avoid running from social interactions but might even make them, dare I say, enjoyable. Try these out at work functions or social situations.

1. Smile. This one little behavior will make you feel better inward and send a positive message outward. A study from Penn State University found that people who smile appear to be more likeable, courteous, and even more competent! Next time you are feeling a tad on the uncomfortable, anxious side and you have to be in a social setting do your best to put on a smile. Even a fake one works!
2. Small talk is a two way street. Small talk is a social tool intended to show your willingness to engage with another person. Even if you initiate the conversation, it doesn’t mean you are responsible for carrying the whole thing. Do your best to hold up your side politely and remind yourself that it takes two to tango. When answering questions, remember you can also circle back and ask them the same question.
3. Start simple. There’s no need to blow the other person out of the water with how clever or funny you are. Opening up small talk is simply the way to gauge whether they’re interested in talking in the first place. A comment on the weather or situation you’re in (waiting for a bus, standing in line for the photocopier, getting food at a party) is a nice place to start.
4. Prepare ahead. It’s nice to have a few conversation starters ready when you enter into a situation where small talk is the gateway to more meaningful connections. “How do you know the host?”, “How do you like this area?” or “Have you tried the ______?” can get you started. Sometimes just having a question on the tip of your tongue gives you the confidence you need to hang in there.
5. Share enough positive information about yourself for the other person or people to be able to frame a response. “I work in HR and you wouldn’t believe how many applications we just got for that new productions position!” If you don’t have a positive conversation starter, remember to keep your conversation on the positive side in general. Nothing is a bigger turnoff than negativity!
6. It’s okay to stand by yourself. Sometimes this is actually a helpful thing to do in social situations. Let’s face it, most people in small talky situations are just as uncomfortable as you. Being by yourself gives another person the opportunity to come up and talk with you versus them having to try to break into a well established cluster of people talking.
7. Lastly, according to therapist Kyle MacDonald, “Small talk is exactly what is says it is: small. There’s no need to turn the conversation into a great debate and, equally, it’s perfectly fine to break off the conversation when you need to. Just be mindful of how you end the engagement: first of all, announce your intention to go and say how you enjoyed the conversation (“I’m going to have to be going now, but I enjoyed talking to you — I’m so glad I found someone else who hates The Hunger Games as much as I do!”), and give them an opportunity to respond and break away too (“Anyway, I’m a friend of Tom’s so I might see you again at another of his parties — hopefully there will be more films we hate out by then!”) The overall trick is to be kind and open with the other person, listen to what they say and respond honestly.”

Small talk definitely gets easier the more you practice. What are some tricks of the trade you’ve found to be helpful?

Social Anxiety? We're Social Beings!!!

Why Do We Have Social Anxiety?

Humans are inherently social creatures and yet many suffer from anxiety that makes being social difficult, if not downright painful. How and why does this happen?

The short answer is that scientists and doctors don’t entirely know. Understanding anxiety, in all its forms, is in its’ infancy despite affecting millions of people worldwide. The most widely suggested contributors to the cause of social anxiety include inherited traits and family background, life experiences and environment, and brain structure.

The Brain

Regarding the role one’s brain structure may play, researchers are making great strides thanks to advanced neuroimaging technology. Scientists are gaining insight into social anxiety and social anxiety disorder in ways that were previously only subject to speculation. Of particular promise are studies that show increased activity in the brain’s amygdala in people with social anxiety compared to those without. The amygdala regulates emotions, survival instincts and memory.

Some of the findings in these studies, although not totally conclusive, suggest that people with social anxiety may have an increased tendency or bias toward ways of processing information in the brain that may contribute to their anxiety. These include a higher tendency to respond more negatively or fearful to social signals, people’s facial expressions and eye contact. Also, those with social anxiety showed more of a tendency to selectively remember the negative information about oneself and one’s social performances instead of the positive or neutral memories. Those with social anxiety showed a bias toward making negative evaluations about past events and negative predictions about their future performance. Lastly, participants showed a tendency toward spending more time processing threat-related information than those without social anxiety.

Does that happen to describe you too? Do you tend to respond in a fearful way in social situations? Do you think predict your presentation will be a flop and that you’ll embarrass yourself at the annual manager’s meeting? Do you already dread that happy hour you said you’d attend? Do you play over and over in your mind how awful it was to go into the grocery store or to your child’s school?

What You Can Do

If you do, no problem! Although we don’t yet know the evolutionary function of this brain structure, we do have many strategies to help compensate for it. The words “tendency” and “bias” give us clues as to where you start. They illustrate a way your brain may be “neurologically leaning” but your brain isn’t set in stone.

In order to stop these leanings from causing your social anxiety, you can increase your awareness toward them and remind yourself these are just your biases talking. Look at the situation again, but this time from the perspective of someone without these biases. For example, “If I didn’t have this worst-case-scenario bias, I’d look at the company’s upcoming happy hours as an opportunity to get to know more people from the office.”